I’m seeing it time after time after time in these and other forums…

“How do I get a bunch of users to my site?”
“How do I get a PR of 9 within the next half hour?”
“Just launched a new site, any ideas on how to get traffic?”

As I’ve said in another thread, I’m assuming that anyone who is looking to market a site or bring traffic to a site is doing it to make money. ‘Cuz I hate to break it to some people, but a PR of 7 does NOT mean that chicks will dig you.

And if you’re going to build a site that you hope to have generate revenue, there is absolutely no way you can expect much success unless you approach it like a business. And that means learning some basic business and marketing skills. You’ve got to ask yourself some very basic questions before the ones above:

1) Why did you build your site?
2) What are the demographics and psychographics of your target market?
3) What are at least three of your largest competitors doing and what are you doing that’s either different or better?
4) What real, tangible thing are you offering your users that’s of use to THEM?

If you don’t have solid, I would say even lengthy answers to all four of THOSE questions, then I would ask a fifth:

5) Why bother marketing your site if it wasn’t important enough to do your homework before you built it?

The ability to “trick” Google, among other things, has created this false impression that the average web geek should be able to build an e-commerce website and market it and have it become successful without having to spend money on it.

Case in point: the website for the South Beach Diet which generates $2 MILLION a MONTH, spends $750,000 a month on marketing - and that’s just their SEARCH marketing.

It’s SUPPOSED to cost money. Marketing isn’t the latest way to trick Google. It isn’t a 7,000-name email list that you can send spam to. It isn’t the latest greatest link farm. Marketing is an art. It’s a science. And it’s a skill that people can easily spend 20 or 30 years developing.

So the answer to questions like “How can I get a bunch of traffic to my brand new website” can be answered VERY simply:

Learn some legitimate marketing skills.

This was actually a post made by imusicians at a forum I used to run. I had asked for Neil’s permission to re-print this as an article and he had kindly granted me the permission to do so.